


Tea Taken Together

by Nadia_Hernandez



Category: Charmed (TV 2018)
Genre: Awkward Romance, Dessert & Sweets, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Friendship/Love, Kindness, Love, Romance, Short & Sweet, Slow Romance, Sweet, Tea, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-14 22:44:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20608571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nadia_Hernandez/pseuds/Nadia_Hernandez
Summary: Tea taken together always feels more civilized than tea taken alone.





	Tea Taken Together

**Author's Note:**

> Only a month until Charmed is back! Exciting, isn't it?

They are set far apart from each other, Macy reflects, in so many ways. She was born in 1987, for example, and he in 1920. He is as English as a person can get (how many times a day can a person eat digestives and sip at a ruthlessly boiling cup of Tetley? seriously?) and she is of mixed African-American and Puerto Rican descent. Her passion and expertise lie in the cold, beautiful precision of genetics and he lives to pour over love letters sent between young men in the nineteenth century, teasing eroticism from the flowery language that defined friendship in that era. On the surface, yeah, it appears that they could not be more different from each other.

And yet below that calm surface lie some similarities so unique as to be almost disturbing. Both of them have died, for example. Macy snorts a derisive laugh when she thinks about it. How would she have reacted to something that ridiculous sounding eighteen months ago? Although she likes to think of herself as having always been open minded she’d have mocked it mercilessly and she damn well knows it. It’s a good thing to understand yourself and, well… she wasn’t always as kind to the woo-woo, Ancient Aliensy stuff. How times change, she thinks, and runs a flour covered hand through her curls.

Flour. Yep, that is another venue--far brighter than the murky depths of thanatopsis--where they seem to reach one another. Both she and Harry and at home in the kitchen and love to rise early with the sun to make breakfast for her sleepy headed sisters. It has become a ritual for them to take a steaming cup at dawn’s first light, the first of his many teas and she the couple of coffees she allows herself, and make pancakes, scrambled eggs, beans on toast, sausage gravy and rashers of good bacon from Thomas Henry’s British Grocery downtown. Even Maggie, who is a good ninety percent of the time vegan-ish, will take the occasional nibble of it. 

Cooking is so precise, she reasons, and both of them are the kind of awkward little dorks who crave precision the way that junkies crave a fix. One must mix ingredients in proper measure to insure that the result is harmonious, after all, lest some nightmare creature escape the oven to consume them all in an orgy of slavering violence. And, Macy considers, this kind of outcome is not longer innocent hyperbole. Such is her life.

The thought of being attacked by the loaf of banana bread they are making makes her giggle and reminds her off the episode of Family Matters when Steven Q. Urkel takes a home ec class and finds that he is not quite up to the challenge. She knows that Urkel was an annoying little creep sometimes but, well, nerdy, socially awkward little black kids had to stick together, right? 

She had felt like Urkel in her young life way more than she had the cool and more or less well-adjusted Winslow kids and had never quite had any kind hearted neighbors like them to help her navigate the foggy terrain of interpersonal relationships. She hadn’t been good at them in high school nor college nor her PhD program. It was not until now, until she sat in the coven of her sisters, that she had found her people, her tribe. Maggie and Macy, the blood of her blood that she had not known ran through her veins, helped to complete her. Maggie and Macy were her family, the first she’d had since her father died. Mel, Maggie and Harry.

Harry? Well, that was complicated…

“Is the oven ready?” he asks. 

“Yeah,” she says. “Preheated to three seventy five. Have you got the batter in a greased pan?”

“But of course.” He opens the door and pops in the banana bread. A rush of warm, dry air fills the kitchen for a moment. It takes only a few moments for them to begin to smell the cinnamon and cardamom--her dad’s secret ingredient--activating in the mixture. “Do you think they’ll like it?”

Macy laughs. “Mel and Maggie are basically sharks. Of course they’ll like it.”

“I know,” he says. “But today is special--one year since you banished your first demon with the Power of Three. I know that banana bread isn’t exactly being feted by the world’s crowned heads but…” He shrugs. “I have very few crowned heads around here and even if I had one it wouldn’t taste very good.”

She wraps her arms around him from behind, enjoying how his lithe, warm body presses against hers. “It’s way better idea than crowned heads. Can you imagine how Mel would react to that? I don’t feel like hearing another rant against the monarchy, patriarchy or basically any kind of ‘archy’ today. This is not a day for rants or archies--this is a day for things that are sweet and bad for our teeth.”

“It was rather awkward when the queen of the sylvan elves decided to pay a state visit to the Charmed Ones and your sister harangued her for an hour about the inalienable rights of pixies, wasn’t it?”

“A little… I mean…” Macy sighed. “It’s not as if Mel didn’t have a point--she always does and she’s almost always even right about stuff but…”

“Her execution lacks grace, perhaps, is the way to put it,” Harry says. “Although perhaps a crusader needn’t be graceful so much as she needs to be able to split an anvil with her sword.”

“Oh my God, please never hand Mel a sword.” Macy giggles. “That could get both awesome and gory, like, super fast.” They rested in companionable silence against the counter for a long moment. “I’m glad we started cooking together like this,” Macy says. “In the morning… whatever. It’s good to have someone to bake stuff with. I love sharing a kitchen with you.”

“I concur,” he says. “Tea never feels nearly so civilized when it is taken alone.”

A thought hangs between them on the razor sharp edge of a moment but neither of them expresses it. The time has not yet come for it to flower, perhaps, or maybe it just needs time to bake like the bread that is rising in the oven. They are content to wait for it, though, and lean against each other in the morning quiet while the smell of something wonderful fills the big, old house that they all share.


End file.
